Google’s Matt Cutts offers an update to the hyphen vs. underscore for SEO URLs status. He reaffirms that yes, Google still treats hyphens as a word separator, and still treats underscores as a word joiner. He confirms in unequivocal terms that you should use hyphens for your URLs.
Google continues to grow their fledgling Google+ social network by introducing their first 16 games, designed to segregate all game notification so they don’t go into your news feed. You only see the game spam if you choose to go to the game page. Facebook responds by increasing the amount of space allocated for games, and increasing the amount of notifications that games and pump into users’ feeds.
A new survey shows that Google+ is on track to be the second largest social network within 12 months, beating LinkedIn and Twitter. The survey suggests that Google+ will be second only to Facebook, and that the new social network will negatively impact Facebook — eating away at Facebook’s users. Compared to Facebook, Google+’s users are younger, better educated, more male and more single.
The Google +1 button is Google’s version of the Facebook Like button, but one problem it had was the slow load speed. Google has just addressed that with a super charge to the Google +1 button load speed, combined with a new asynchronous code snipped that you can use to ensure that the Google +1 button doesn’t slow the load speed of your site.
The keyword meta tag has been completely ignored by search engines for years because it was too easily abused. But what about a negative keywords meta tag? Why can’t we tell search engines what words not to rank us for? Adwords advertisers have it, why can’t we have one for organic SEO?
